I'm glad to see these viewpoints laid out so passionately. It really helps me identify the kind of engineer I don't want to become as I roll through my 30s and beyond.
Everyone is stupid if they don't use my workflow. New customers are confused by the UI? Good. They're dumb anyway. How'd they get to be engineers? Anyone going through a 4 year program should know how to use this website! Good riddance! Digikey doesn't need such dumb customers.
Seriously what kind of attitude is this? Digikey doesn't exist to rant at the clouds about youngsters these days. They're here to attract new customers and keep existing ones and grow their business. As is every business. Only they know whether their changes accomplish this goal or not, because they're the only ones with relevant data. I hope they fire any web designer that can't set up simple A/B tests without going off on a tangential rant about how everyone is stupid nowadays.
As someone who is a) old enough to have established preferences and experienced things change for the sake of change, but b) has always had an interest in usability, c) has worked as a user interface designer, including at a usability agency where we did do user testing, d) has always hated the elitist attitude of Linux, etc, and d) has always had an interest in electronics, and is now changing to that as a career, I think you're absolutely right.
Now that said: yes, I agree that some of their design changes aren't great for my workflow. The picklist threw me off for a bit at first until I got used to it. Which took about 15 minutes. Do I like it more? Not sure yet, but there have been many times in the past when I accidentally let go of CTRL and wiped the selection I spent a while making. So I get the motivation. It's ironic to rant about dummies who don't understand a simple UI considering how it's arguably even simpler now. Glass houses, etc.
Yep. In all fairness, I'm not sure what'd be wrong with lists of checkboxes, since that's essentially what the new lists are. But with the old ones, it's so easy to accidentally wipe out a complex selection, just as you said.
What a lot of people forget is that a good interface buffers you from errors or lets you recover from them easily. It's not just beginners who make mistakes,
everyone does, all the time. That's why "undo" was revolutionary. (And why it shocks me how, especially on mobile, Windows and Linux, there are still lots of apps with poor or nonexistent undo.)
This is the same attitude Linux fanboys have. I wonder how "everyone who can't use a command line is stupid" Linux is doing vs MacOS in the consumer market? I wonder why that could be.
Yup.
Doesn't mean everything DK does is perfect but they're not going to listen to people ranting about young engineers in lieu of constructive criticism. I'm as opinionated as anyone else but I try to consider things from other viewpoints in case I'm wrong. And frankly the more I progress in my career, the more and more I encounter mid-to-late career engineers who are needlessly bitter/angry about literally every little thing. It takes actual work to not go that route and folding your arms saying "everyone's dumb but me" isn't the way. Anecdotally this attitude has been much more prevalent in the EE field than any other field I work with. Who knows.
I see it in EE, but also with old-school IT/CS people (who needn't be old people, there are plenty of young ones who still like the old-school mindset). For a lot of engineers, it's really hard to step into the mindset of people who aren't identically technically-minded as them. I worded that that way because I've seen plenty of people who have extraordinary technical expertise in one area, but not another, and as such, you can have someone who is a gifted engineer in one area, but nonetheless is a relatively unskilled computer user.
Plus, why should stuff be needlessly complex to use? User interfaces need to be as simple as possible, but as complex as needed (but no more!). That's why it's acceptable for professional software to be more complex than consumer software. But if the needed pro functionality can be accomplished an easier way, then it should be.
I also have to remind people that the easiest interface is the one the user already knows. In other words, if you can make your interface work like something the user
already knows, then it's the easiest of all. So even if you have an idea that works well in isolation, if it's very different from everything else, it is still likely to be harder to use in practice. Incremental change is a good way to overcome this, by slightly extending an existing interface bit by bit (for example, how someone came up with the "pull to refresh" action in mobile phone lists: it extends the existing interface seamlessly).
On-topic: When I was a new engineer I had no problems with the picklists (yay) but I admit that Digikey wasn't really useful to me. I wasn't working with an existing BOM, rather was looking for random parts to do cool projects. In other words: trying to discover new products. And it wasn't really great for that. It still isn't IMO. Nowadays I know exactly what I'm looking for so Digikey is much more usable for me, but I understand the struggle for new and/or inexperienced engineers. It took a while for Digikey to "make sense." Until that point I frequented Sparkfun and Adafruit much more often because they cater to new engineers and really just to exploring and discovering cool stuff. They're not really comparable. I definitely don't want Digikey to change that much but there's probably something they could borrow that would make it more enticing for new engineers. Throwing a bone to a new engineer today might mean tens of thousands of dollars in POs in the future.
Honestly, what's missing is old-school catalogs. I have never encountered a web shop that manages to recreate the browseability of a paper catalog. (DK tried: in addition to the parametric search and categories, there's a whole separate layer of content as the
online catalog and the manufacturer pages, etc. But it never caught on.) I love perusing catalogs to discover things I didn't know to look for. Searches are great for when you know exactly what you need and what it's called. But it's terrible for just random discovery.
Your attitude is to change something making it more difficult for one group in an attempt to make it easier for another group, how is that any better? This is such a trivial thing that simply informing someone how to do it would solve the "problem". Perhaps you'll "get it" once you're old enough to have gotten bored of change for the sake of change and tired of re-leaning things you already spent time learning and having your workflow and muscle memory disrupted by pointless changes.. Get off your high horse, you're not any more virtuous than the rest of us and you're not going to be fundamentally different when you grow up than the people you're complaining about..
You're accusing
him of being on a high horse?!?
Then what are you riding, an elephant?
A good design makes it better for
everyone. "I had to learn to suffer with the old, hard interface, so so should you" is not a sensible argument against improvement. (But it's absolutely the attitude many espouse.) A truly exceptional interface is so transparent that you don't need to actively "learn" it, it just works the way you expect, without thought, letting you focus on your
task rather than on the tool you're using to accomplish it. (This is what IMHO the Mac has always been far better at than anyone else: the interface just doesn't get in my way the way Windows does.) But any change is going to involve some adjustment for existing users, even if it's objectively a change for the better.
I actually agree that in the past few years, there's been a lot of pointless change in computer interfaces, a substantial amount of which is absolutely for the worse. (Like removing all visible cues to features? Hello, insanity! And the nonsense of designs so "airy" that there's less content on a 27" screen than on an old 14" 640x480 CRT back in 1994...) But that fact doesn't mean
all change is bad! Some things were bad design decisions at the time, or were imposed by technical limitations that no longer apply. Such designs
deserve to be replaced.